After placing the black box on the golden altar, Solario stood on its left and asked Vance to stand on its right. The two faced each other, with only a meter separating them, and looked one another in the eye. The smoldering tension and overt antagonism, which characterized previous ocular confrontations, moderated into tepid unease and hesitant neutrality. He can’t play any tricks on me. Vance averted his gaze and shifted it to the black box. But why can’t I? Even if my Duplicity is zero, I have my spectral dagger.

“I know what you’re plotting, human,” Solario said. “No, you can’t kill me and steal the box. If you do, you will never be able to open it. It’s an heirloom that I inherited from my father, and its lock mechanism is one thousand times harder than any optical contraption.”

“You thought everything through, didn’t you?” Vance smiled. “So, tell me, how will we consummate our fair deal, Kaz?”

“It’s King Solario,” the elf said. “And the answer to your trifling question is more than simple. We will be using the same method that my kind has used in ancient times. It’s based on an intriguing side effect of the Heliacal Oath.”

“Sounds complicated.” Vance took out a potion from his bag and started to drink it, replenishing his HP. “Don’t mind me. Continue.”

“It’s … It’s not complicated,” Solario said, less enthusiastic than before. “The Heliacal Oath ensures that you are truthful. Lies and deceit are forbidden …”

“I’m listening,” Vance said, putting away the empty potion bottle.

“Accordingly, when you speak about the future in this sanctum, it’s as if you are making a solemn promise. If I say that I will give you a bucket of gold, this statement becomes a binding commitment, and Helios will smite me with a heavenly bolt if I break my word.”

“What happens if you promise something impossible?” Vance said.

“You can’t. The words won’t leave your mouth.”

“And what if circumstances prevented me from keeping a promise?”

“Why are you complicating things?” Solario sighed. “Helios will not punish you unless you break a promise with mens rea—the intention to defy and defile the sacred oath.”

“You should’ve said so from the start.”

“You didn’t give me a chance,” Solario sighed again. “Anyway, let’s fulfill our deal. First, you have to—”

“No,” Vance interrupted. “Before you start, I have a few questions for you.”

“What? Questions?”

“You can’t lie in this sanctum, and I gotta use this chance.”

“But I can refuse to answer.”

“And lose a few fingers?” Vance smiled.

“Ask to your heart’s content. I will answer everything.”

Vance took a moment to organize his thoughts. He didn’t want to ask about the tiny details of the Heliacal Oath or learn more about the history of goblins. There were, in fact, a few words that had been lingering in his mind since he first encountered the solar elf. When the raging elven spirit was still inside a rotting mummy, when Solario first emerged from his hidden repose, Amirani was mentioned not as a god but as a mere human. The Church didn’t teach that Amirani was elevated to godhood; it taught that the god of humans was present even before the birth of the universe. And despite the irony, Vance wanted the elf to teach him more about human history.

“Who were you in your lifetime as an elf?” Vance said. “And who was the Amirani you mentioned earlier?”

“Interested in more history, aren’t we?” Solario said pointedly. “Very well. I was the thirty-third king of solar elves—the Patron of Nekhen and the Chosen of Helios. Amirani was the king of your kind. Now let’s get back—”

“Not so fast,” Vance interrupted. “You called him the traitor king. Why?”

“Why? A human has the nerve to ask me why?” Solario clenched his fists before he swallowed his boiling anger and said, “This land you humans occupy is sacred.” He looked down at the altar. “Solar elves, lunar elves, and humans had been warring over this soil for millennia … until Amirani came. The traitor sought an unlikely alliance with me, but when we defeated the lunar elves and drove them out, he stabbed me in the back and started the Great Purge.” Solario pounded the altar with both fists. “You savages massacred my kind. You killed thousands of solar elves and forced them out of their cities and sanctuaries.”

“And you were left behind?” Vance said.

“Yes … My kind fled to other lands, but I couldn’t; I had a severe injury from which there was no recovery—a parting gift from the vile traitor. Trapped as I was, I named a new king, spread rumors that I had died, and retreated with a few of my followers to these tombs. We hid beneath our own graves and decided to bide our time.”

“Were you harvesting Mana all this time?”

“Yes … We needed tremendous amounts to prolong our lives and claim new bodies. And we were close to achieving our distant goal … very close. But 20 years ago, something changed. Our irreplaceable lifelines were cut, one after the other. And my followers died in their stone chairs. It was you again, wicked short-ears … You were undoing the spells concealing our orbs and glass pipes. You were dismantling our clockwork machinery and sentencing us to death.”

The excavations …

“But I survived. I came for your body. And you know the rest.”

Vance paused for a few seconds to piece everything together. It was a strange coincidence that had put this elf in his path, but it didn’t feel right to call it only mere coincidence. A hidden clock had been ticking for thousands of years, and the sound of the pipes’ shattering, the noise of Kaz’s sword against the glass, was the chime of this ancient timepiece. Loud and resounding, it announced a meeting between an enemy of the Church and an enemy of the Church’s god. The two were too different to form an alliance, but they were similar enough to understand each other.

“What will you do if I let you go?” Vance said.

“I will get strong again. Then … If Amirani is alive, I will kill him. If not, I will kill his descendants.”

“And then?”

“I will not live as a wicked human. I will join my followers in the heavens.”

“You’re still under the Heliacal Oath.”

“I know,” Solario said resolutely. “This is what I decided in my darkest hour. This is the path I’ve chosen for myself.”

I guess this makes him an enemy of the Church, in a weird way. Vance thought, as his eyes returned to watching the black box. And my world could use more of those. I can set him free, and he shouldn’t get in my way. Maybe he could even prove to be a good distraction for the authorities.

“I answered all your questions, human. Can we take care of business now?” Solario said. “You’ve embarrassed and humiliated me for long enough, and it’s time I restored my dignity.”

“All right,” Vance said. “Back to business.”

“We have to place both hands on the altar. Yours should go near the corners on your side. There are faint markings to guide you.”

Vance and Solario put their hands on the cubic altar. A symbol appeared on the golden surface and shone with a silver-blue light. It was the family crest of the Royal House of Nekhen, which adorned the most sacred sections of these tombs. Its design featured a central drawing of a Fiery Ibis, and around this legendary monster, there were alternating representations of turbines and cogs. Three concentric circles surrounded these machine parts and seemed to push them closer toward the bird in the center, giving the overall design a sense of unity and integrity.

“What’s the crest for?” Vance asked.

“It’s part of our tradition to look upon it as we consummate a deal,” Solario said. His eyes were tearful as he gazed at his family crest. It seemed that it had been a long time since he last saw it shine so brightly—as vividly as dew-coated flowers glisten at dawn—and the sight may have summoned many memories from the ancient vaults of his mind. But he didn’t linger over his bittersweet recollections; the circumstances didn’t allow him. And he said with formality, “The first promise is ceremonial. Repeat what I say next.”

Vance nodded.

“I will honor the sacred oath I made to Mighty Helios.”

Vance repeated the same sentence.

“Now we can state the conditions for our deal. Each of them should take the form of a binding promise,” Solario said. “It’s a fact that the contents of this black box are as valuable as my own life. It contains information that can lead you to Haemal Weapons. If you want me to unlock it, promise me that you will let me go unharmed, that you won’t reveal my true identity to other humans, and that you won’t track me down.”

“I’ll let you go unharmed,” Vance began. “I’ll hide your true identity from other humans. And I won’t track you down.”

“My promise to you: I will open this black box now and bestow upon you its contents,” Solario said. Then, relaxing his tense muscles, he added, “Mighty Helios is witness and judge. Our promises bind us until they are fulfilled, and our future is for us to create. May we find the strength to remain true to our word.” He lifted his hands from the altar, and the family crest disappeared from its surface. “We’re done, human.”

“Open the box,” Vance said.

Solario picked it up with one hand and started rotating its six faces with the other, as if it had been a Rubik’s Cube. All the faces had the same dark color, however, and the rotations produced neither visual nor auditory responses. The nature of the lock and the elf’s aim remained a total mystery—material for the creative and the imaginative. But then a subsequent spin of the wrist, although hardly different from its predecessors, started an unnoticeable tick inside the box. And less than a second later, parallel white lines suddenly appeared on its outer surface, dividing it into equal squares—each only a centimeter wide.

With a facial expression of deep concentration, Solario proceeded to press on certain squares until they clicked into one of four depths. He was slow but both adept and confident. The fingers that he had now were slightly thicker than their elven counterparts, but he had already learned to use them as effectively as he could. Following the sixty-fourth click, the secure lid of the box opened backward with a jolt. Solario relaxed his neck and shoulders and smiled with self-satisfaction. His hand disappeared inside the box, and when it reappeared, it was wrapped around a golden pouch.

“I believe that’s mine,” Vance said.

“Of course.” Solario tossed the pouch to its new owner.

Unraveling a delicate silver ribbon, Vance opened his long-awaited prize and emptied its contents on the altar. To his utter dismay, however, he didn’t find a detailed map or a scribbly journal. When he held the pouch upside down and shook it, three rodential ribs fell out with a clank. They looked like the bones that Timathor had offered him after it hunted in Blackmoss Forest—the bones that he had thrown away because they were unsanitary. And it felt like an insult devised by the affrontive elf that the prize was nothing short of goblin trash.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Vance said, ready to use his dagger.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Solario blurted, with a whoa gesture, in quick defense of himself. “I haven’t deceived you at all. Check the ribs more carefully. They’re made of painted metal.”

Vance held one of them, and it was true. He also noticed that there were tiny carvings on the inner sides of the metal ribs. Something was written vertically in a logographic alphabet that he had never seen before, an indecipherable group of primal symbols that seemed to be neither human nor elven.

“My father, King Solsamar, was sympathetic toward the Miresian dwarves,” Solario said. “He once found an injured shaman and took her back to his palace. She was in critical condition, with the marks of a highlander’s ax all over her body. Even our most advanced medical technology couldn’t save her. She died a few days later, and we found these metal ribs in her rags, along with a dwarven insignia decorated with emeralds and diamonds.”

“What do these writings mean?” Vance said, as he examined the symbols.

“No one knows for sure. The Miresians have developed a primitive language of their own, and no one could translate it at my time. But there are two words written in the standard dwarven alphabet: Haemal Hall.”

“So you’ve given me worthless gibberish.”

“No. I’ve given you priceless gibberish. These three metal ribs are so valuable that my father spent 500 years trying to decipher their cryptic inscriptions. But my father never tamed a Miresian dwarf, never enlisted a ‘goblin’ to fight for him. You have an indisputable advantage, human. I would’ve had to spend another 500 years to find the Haemal Weapons, but you … you might do it in 50 or even 5. You might shift the balance of power in this world.”

“Are all elves smooth-talkers like you?”

“The deal may seem tipped in my favor, but it’s as fair as the sun,” Solario said confidently. “I gave up on my father’s lifelong dream, while you betrayed your kind and set me free.”

“You promised me information.”

“The information is there, even if it’s not readable.”

Vance smiled wryly and said, “Does Mighty Helios allow sophistry?”

“Such insolence! There is no sophistry in what I said.”

“I’ll make you regret this, elf.”

“You promised to let me go unharmed. There’s nothing you can do now.”

Vance wasn’t fully satisfied with the lackluster outcome. He felt that he had been tricked by the solar elf and his god, that they had twisted the definition of “information” to rationalize their deception inside the sanctum; but there was no use in petty arguments or endless back-and-forth. He picked up the metal ribs and put them away in his bag. Even if they had no practical value in the present, there might come a time when they would prove their worth. And in an effort to convince himself of this optimistic view, he began to detail the steps that he would follow to decrypt the goblin enigma:

I don’t think Timathor can read or write, but it can help me find a goblin who can. This takes care of the jump from alphabet to sounds. The tricky part is the jump from sounds to actual meaning. I’ll have to learn the goblin tongue if I want to understand anything. With neither books nor resources, it’ll take a lot of effort and a long time. These metal ribs will collect dust for a while until I have a real use for them. But if I’m lucky enough, they may one day lead me to Haemal Hall. And if I’m even luckier, no one will have reached it before me.

And so Vance came to terms with the bland reality. Without the dreaminess of young adventurers, he took the rational decision to designate the search for Haemal Hall as a long-term project—a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Then he turned his attention to the more pressing matters of the moment.

“Let’s go, Kaz. Lead the way to the surface.”

“How many times will you make me say it? It’s King Solario.”

Status Alert Bane Removed: Heliacal Oath

Solario closed the safe from which he had retrieved the black box. Then he sealed the Solar Sanctum, resetting the optical lock so that no human could access it. A look of longing and wistfulness appeared on his face as he watched the sanctum disappear behind stone. He rested his head against the door for a few silent moments. Then he smiled and turned away, as if he had finally let go of the memories. Before he had walked five steps, however, he heard a crash behind him. He turned around again and found on the ground the glass shards of what had once been an empty potion bottle.

“What’s the meaning of this, human?”

“Nothing,” Vance said. “I had to release a bit of my pent-up anger after our disappointing deal. Don’t worry. I wasn’t aiming for you or anything.”

“Ahem, what’s done is done,” Solario said. “We both need to get out of here, so it’s in our best interest to forget and cooperate.”

Good. He’s still afraid of me. Vance smiled and said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

***

After fifteen minutes of walking, the narrow passage past the Solar Sanctum widened into a vast area, which Solario dubbed the Mirror Maze. There were hundreds of serpentine corridors, whose high walls were made of thick mirrors and whose floors often collapsed into thorny pitfalls. The myriad reflections had a disorienting effect on anyone who tried to traverse this maze, and the traps added an extra layer of difficulty, especially because some of them had been converted into slime nests. To conquer the maze, a human needed to explore several branching paths and painstakingly eliminate the dead ends from a mental map. Solario, however, knew a convenient shortcut.

“This way, human.”

Applying pressure on two ground plates, the solar elf opened a path through the thick walls of the maze. Vance and Timathor followed him into these walls, cheating their way past the traps and the dead ends. The three advanced at a steady pace. With the back side of the one-way mirrors on their right and left, they could see the Water Slimes crawling and jumping outside, but these slimes remained unaware of their presence or proximity. It was as if they were visiting an ancient zoo promising safe exposure to the slippery monsters.

“Did you build this maze to protect the sanctum?” Vance said, as he walked.

“No,” Solario answered, “we built it to test and train our inventions.”

“You mean, like Kogelstein?”

“Yes.”

“Seems like an easy test for a machine.”

“Easy, you say?” Solario rejoined. “The ability to recognize reflections is a confirmatory sign of machine intelligence. To discover the correct path amid a thousand reflections—that is machine genius!”

“Machine genius, huh?” Vance laughed.

“What’s funny, human?”

“Nothing,” Vance said. “You just reminded me of an old friend.”

Solario didn’t comment, and Vance didn’t add another word.

Shortly afterward, the group of three reached the end of the Mirror Maze. Here they had a choice between sixteen different doors. Fifteen continued into deeper sections of the labyrinth, while only one led closer to the surface. It was a chance for Solario’s knowledge to shine, and he asserted his importance once more. He made Vance guess a few times and laughed after every guess. Then he puffed his chest and opened the seventh door from the left. It remained unclear how Vance should have guessed the right path, since there were neither hints nor puzzles, but the solar elf still used this moment to declare elven supremacy.

“We’re near the exit, human. And you owe it to elven intelligence.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just get us out of here.”

The ground began to slope upward until it reached a sharp acclivity. Then a new chamber appeared from between jagged rocks. It had a high roof and four stone pillars, each inscribed with writings in elvenform. The area among these pillars was half the size of Kogelstein’s chamber, but it was as empty as to beget a sense of desolation. There were neither pipes nor sarcophagi, only three metal levers that were attached to the ground near the center. From these levers, and from the slight unevenness in the floor, Vance theorized that he had arrived at an elevator, and he waited to see how Solario would operate it.

“Behold the dazzling sun of Mighty Helios!” Solario grasped the middle lever and pulled it toward him, but nothing happened. “Huh?” He returned the lever to its original position and tried again, but to no avail. “Elven luck manifests on three.” He tried for a third time and failed just as miserably as before. “Such obstinacy! What’s wrong with this thing? Is the mechanism jammed?”

“The sun’s so bright my eyes are hurting,” Vance said.

“Shut up! This is the right lever,” Solario said, bending to check the gear. “It should open the foldable roof. I don’t know why it’s not wor—aaah!” Before he could finish his sentence, Solario noticed a clear liquid oozing from under the levers. “An accursed slime!” He backed away in a hurry, like a timorous child, and cowered behind Vance and Timathor.

The three watched as several gallons of liquid emerged from the cracks in the ground. Scattered puddles formed around the levers. Then the liquid collected in one location and formed the body of an alkaline slime. It was twice as tall as Vance and five times as wide. Embedded inside its gargantuan body were nine slime nuclei. They were suspended inside the semitransparent liquid, with a complex arrangement that put them at the vertices of an invisible enneagram. Never had a slime been born in nature with more than one nucleus; never had a slime been born in nature with this size.

“No, this can’t be real,” Solario said. “It’s … It’s Wasserstein.”

“You have a name for this slime?” Vance chuckled.

“This isn’t an ordinary slime, human. I’m the one who designed its cores.”

“You?”

“Yes, me. I did brilliant work, but … I was young. It failed several important tests, and we had it locked up in a container deep underground.”

“How did it get out, then?”

“I don’t know … But I suspect you humans had something to do with it.”

“And now I have to clean up this mess, right?”

“Or you can let it digest us all. Your choice.”

Vance looked at the slime through his monstroscope. The gadget responded after a short delay and revealed that it was a level 30 monster. So it only escaped its container recently. Vance smiled. It shouldn’t pose much of a threat. Before he could feel too comfortable with this assessment, however, the gadget vibrated with a sudden alert. He looked through it a second time and noticed that a red banner had been placed below Wasserstein. In a wide font, this banner read, “Warning: Area Boss. Warning: Area Boss. Warning: Area Boss.”